Far as the Curse is Found | Genesis 3:8-19
Brian Hedges | June 12, 2016
Good morning. This morning, I’m going to start with a quotation from that great theologian, Calvin. No, not the Reformer John Calvin, but rather Bill Waterson’s character Calvin, from the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes! I don’t know if you can read the text on the screen. I’ll read it to you:
Calvin [little boy]: “Nothing I do is my fault.”
Hobbes [his tiger]: Scratches his whiskers…
Calvin: “My family is dysfunctional and my parents won’t empower me! Consequently, I’m not self-actualized!”
Calvin continues: “My behavior is addictive functioning in a disease process of toxic codependency! I need holistic healing and wellness before I’ll accept any responsibility for my actions!”
To which Hobbes replies: “One of us needs to stick his head into a bucket of ice water.”
Calvin: “I love the culture of victimhood.”
Well, that’s pretty astute cultural commentary, if not theology, isn’t it? We live in a culture of victimhood, where people are very reluctant to take responsibility for their actions.
Now, this isn’t to deny that there are real victims and real crimes and that victims suffer consequences. But all too often, rather than taking responsibility for our moral choices, we’re quick to shift the blame. We’re quick to blame others.
So, the concept of sin is foreign to us, as a culture, even though we live with the consequences of sin every day.
As a moral concept, sin is increasingly outdated and obsolete. This is what led the psychiatrist Karl Menninger to write the book, Whatever Became of Sin? in the 1970’s. He lamented that while people today may admit being “stupid or sick or criminal,” no one wanted to take responsibility for their [wrong] moral actions. Menninger said, “Anxiety and depression we all acknowledge, and even vague guilt feelings; but has no one committed any sins?”
On the other hand, we live in a world that is etched with suffering and wracked with pain. Turn on the evening news, and you’ll soon be depressed by latest school shooting, or political scandal, or terrorist attack or neighborhood crime.
Closer to home, we all know the pain of physical affliction, social disintegration, relational breakdowns, emotional distress, and alienation from God. We live in a world full of suffering. The Scriptures tell us that this is the result of human rebellion against the Creator himself. The brokenness of our world is a consequence of sin.
So, even if we don’t acknowledge the concept of sin in our culture, we live with the empirical evidence of it every day, don’t we? because we live in a broken world.
The book of Genesis gives us the biblical and theological explanation for why the world is in the state that it’s in. That comes to us from the third chapter of Genesis.
This morning we’re going to be looking at Genesis 3:8-19. This follows the temptation of the man and the woman in the garden by the serpent, and their fall into sin. We looked at this last week in Genesis 3:1-7.
Today we read about the confrontation between God and the rebellious couple, as he comes to them, pursues them, and then confronts them with their sin. We have here the oracles of God’s judgment on their sin. Let’s read the passage:
“And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’ He said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.’ Then the LORD God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent deceived me, and I ate.' The LORD God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’ To the woman he said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’ And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it,” cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’”
This is the Word of the Lord.
This passage describes for us the consequences of the Fall and, in so doing, it shows us three postures of human beings in relationship to God:
I. Hiding from the Face of God
II. Suffering under the Judgment of God
III. Trusting in the Grace of God
I want to look at each one of those three things.
I. Hiding from the Face of God
This is what you see in verses 8-13, beginning at the end of verse 8: “The man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden...”
Now that phrase, “the presence of the Lord God”—the Hebrew word for “presence” there is the word “face.” You read that and you may wonder, “How can they hide from the presence of God? Isn’t God omnipresent? Isn’t he everywhere present at all times?” Well, yes he is, but here the idea is not so much of trying to hide from the omnipresence of God, but trying to hide from the face of God.
You know that there’s something especially intimate and close and relational about seeing someone face-to-face. Only lovers really gaze at one another’s face for a lengthy period of time. If you try to stare someone closely in the face for too long, people will avert their eyes—especially if someone is ashamed.
Have you ever caught a child “in the act?” Their hand is in the cookie jar, they’re doing something they shouldn’t have done. You ask them, “What is it that you have done?”—they look away. They don’t want to look you in the eye, right?
Well, here, the man and the woman, who were made for communion with God—they were made for relationship with God, they were made to gaze on the face of the living Lord!—they are ashamed because of their guilt, because of their sin, and so they hide from the face of God.
This will be, by and large, the course of human beings throughout the history of humanity and the history of Scripture.
In Genesis 4:16, Cain—having committed the first murder, the first homicide—is banished from God’s presence. The text says, “Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”
That’s descriptive of all of us, really, isn’t it? We all live “east of Eden;” we all live banished from the presence of God.
Psalm 114:7 says, “Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob.”
Only occasionally in Scripture will someone venture to ask, “Lord, can I see your face?” You remember Moses, on the mountain, in Exodus 33:18-20? He said, “Lord, show me your glory.” And the Lord says to Moses, “No one can see my face and live.”
Indeed, at the end of human history, in Revelation chapter 6, we read of those who call “to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face. . .of the Lamb. . .’” What is it?! What’s going on here?
The face of God, which was originally turned toward man in love and in blessing and in grace and favor—now we hide from that face! The face is a terror to us because of our sin.
Indeed, the ultimate judgment is described in 2 Thessalonians 1:9: “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” God’s face turned away from the soul forever and ever—hiding from the face of God.
So, that’s what we see here in this first movement of the text: the man and the woman hiding from the face of God, from the presence of the Lord, retreating into the trees.
But, then, God comes pursuing, and God—in Scripture—is always the Great Pursuer. I love that Wes mentioned that they talked this morning in our student/youth ministries about God the Father as the Great Initiator. He’s the Great Initiator, he’s the Great Pursuer.
He’s who Frances Thompson called, in that old poem, “The Hound of Heaven. . .” Why does he call him, “the Hound of Heaven?” Because, like a hound on a scent—that will not relent, but chases down its prey to the very end—so God, in love and mercy, pursues us. He pursues us! And that’s what we see in the passage, as He comes to the man and to the woman, and he pursues them.
And notice how he comes, in verse 9, asking a question: “The Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” Now, it’s not that God doesn’t know where the man is; this is a question of accountability. He’s bringing the man into account.
What does Adam do? Well, he confesses his fear, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and hid myself.”
And then God continues to ask the question, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
Then Adam, very much like Calvin (in that little comic strip) passes the buck, doesn’t he? “The woman that you gave to me, she gave me the fruit.” He’s initially blaming Eve, but ultimately he’s blaming God. “You gave me the woman and she gave me the fruit and I ate the fruit. So, ultimately, it’s your fault!” This is a blasphemy, really, as Adam blames Eve and then blames God for his sin.
God then turns to the woman: “What is this that you have done?” The woman also passes the buck. She says, ““The serpent deceived me, and I ate [it].” This is that old Flip Wilson excuse, “The devil made me do it!”
Man, hiding from the face of God, living in denial, passing the buck, turning away from God’s presence—that leads right into the oracles of judgment that follow in verses 14-19. Here we see man's...
II. Suffering under the Judgment of God
Now, we have to understand the scene of judgment. James Montgomery Boice, in his commentary, describes the book of Genesis almost like a play that moves through a number of scenes. So, in Genesis 1 and 2, you have the first scene of Creation. Then you have a domestic scene, as Eve is created, and the man and his wife are together there in the paradise of the garden. Then, in the first part of Genesis 3, the temptation scene.
And now, the scene is one of judgment. In fact, the whole passage follows something like a judicial framework. First, you have the man and woman arraigned as the Lord God comes to them in verses 8 and 9. Then follows something like a cross-examination, as God questions them about what they have done. And now, beginning in verse 14, comes the verdict.
So, here we have the oracles of God’s judgment, and they come in three parts: first, judgment on the serpent, then on the woman, and then on the man.
(1) To the serpent, God says (vv. 14-15) “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.”
Some people suppose that this is something like a “just so” story, describing how the serpent came to crawl on its belly—and have even speculated that the serpent, at one time, was a different kind of creature. The text doesn’t tell us that; it’s pure speculation.
It’s probably better to see that this is giving symbolism to the serpent crawling on his belly and is showing the reason for the hostility, the enmity, that exists between most human beings and snakes and serpents (although there are those rare folks who actually enjoy having a snake for a pet).
When the text says, “Dust you shall eat all the days of your life”—this is not meant to be a scientific statement, as some who would scoff at Scripture might say. It’s not that the snake literally eats dust. Rather, this is rather a figurative way of describing abject humiliation.
In Psalm 72:9, we read this statement: “May the desert tribes bow down before him, and his enemies lick the dust!” That’s the idea here. God is essentially saying to the serpent (but not just to the serpent, but also to that evil, insidious power the serpent symbolizes), “Eat dirt! Lick the dust!”
Then, in verse 15, there is this word that, eventually, we understand as something of a word of promise, for God says, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” It’s a really layered text, describing enmity—not just between human beings and serpents—but between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent. That “offspring” probably has in mind the offspring of evil, those who are characterized by evil.
You remember how Jesus described some people as “the children of the devil.” In fact, all of us by nature and prior to God’s saving grace/salvation, we are sons of disobedience; we are more characterized by evil than we are by good.
Gordon Wenham says: “Once admitted that this symbolizes sin, death, and the power of evil, it becomes much more likely that the curse envisages a long struggle between good and evil, with mankind eventually triumphing.” (p.80) Of course, we have to wait until the New Testament revelation to see how that triumph will come about.
That’s God’s oracle of judgment on the serpent, and then. . .
(2) To the the woman (v. 16), God says, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
Here, the effects of the fall, the consequences of sin, are two-fold: affecting the two dimensions of woman’s existence: the bearing of children and her relationship to her husband.
First of all, in childbearing: She bears children now in pain, in labor and in travail. What was meant to be the greatest moment of joy—and still is a great moment of joy—is yet fraught with a kind of deep and intense suffering. And then, secondly, the relationship to her husband. This phrase, “Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you,”—that’s been variously understood.
The clue to its meaning really come from Genesis 4:7, where the Lord says to Cain: “Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it” (using the same two words, “desire” and “rule”). The idea there is that sin wants to dominate Cain and rule over him, but he has to fight back. So, here the idea in relationship to the woman is that, rather than having a harmonious relationship of love and joy and delight—as God created marriage to be—marriage, rather, will become characterized by conflict. Now, by God’s grace, this isn’t always the case, but so often it is the case; there’s conflict in marriage.
Derek Kidner writes: “‘To love and cherish’ becomes ‘to desire and dominate.’ While even pagan marriages can rise far above this, the pull of sin is always towards it.”
We see that in our social relationships; sin is always trying to tear us apart, so that rather than our relationships being characterized by love and mutual delight and mutual submission, we’re always seeking to rule, we’re always seeking to dominate others.
Then, thirdly, you have. . .
(3) The consequences of sin for the man. First of all, God tells Adam, “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life...” (v. 17). Just as the woman’s childbearing is now labor, so the man’s pursuit of sustenance and life is also labor. Why? Because the ground is cursed. "Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground...” (v. 18).
So, the ground is cursed—which means work; vocation is fraught with toil and labor and with hardship, and then, at the end of verse 19, the ultimate penalty here: “You shall return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Just as we say at every graveside, when we bury someone, “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” so here, the sentence for sin is death. The wages of sin is death.
Now, when you put all of these together, you can see the comprehensive scope of sin’s consequences. This passage shows us how sin affects us in all dimensions of our existence, spiritually. Sin has broken our relationship with God, so the vertical relationship is broken.
But psychologically, sin has affected our relationship with ourselves, so that we’re characterized now, psychologically, by shame and by fear and by guilt, just as Adam and Eve were in the garden.
Then, there is breakdown in the horizontal relationships between men and women and between human beings, and between societies and nations. And there’s also breakdown in our environmental relationships—so that we live in a broken world, fraught with disorder in our very ecology.
This shows us how deeply sin has affected us, and it gives an explanation for why the world is as it is. We’ve seen man hiding from the face of God, now our condition of suffering under the judgment of God. What hope is there for us?
Thirdly, we turn to. . .
III. Trusting in the Grace of God
We see a couple of indications of God’s grace in this passage. Rather than wiping the man and the woman out, as God justly could have done (he could have just wiped them out right then! but he didn’t), he pursued them; he lovingly came after them; he commuted the sentence so they don’t immediately die. They are banished from the garden, to be sure, but they don’t immediately die. God allows the human race to live on. (vv. 8-13)
Then, hidden in those oracles of judgment, there’s this word of promise (v. 15); this has been called “the protoevangelium," “the first gospel” – what one commentator, Derek Kidner, calls “the first glimmer of the gospel” – “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” And that little glimmer of good news, as Scripture progresses, becomes a blazing promise of God’s grace to bring salvation and to bring redemption.
I want us to end just by looking at three elements of God’s gracious promise that we need to trust:
(1) The defeat of evil. This passage is really the beginning of a theme that runs through Scripture, and that is the conflict between man and the devil, the conflict between God and the devil. The end of that conflict is seen in the triumph of Christ over the evil one. You see this in Revelation 12:9-11. The text says, “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent [so, identifying this character, this personification of evil, this person with the serpent in Genesis 3], who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. . .he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, ‘Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. . .And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.’”
I think this shows us that the conquering seed of the woman is ultimately Christ, who in his kingdom vanquishes the powers of evil—he defeats evil; he conquers over evil once and for all!
The apostle John says in 1 John 3:8: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” And Paul extends this image to the church itself when he says in Romans 16:20: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.”
Charles Wesley captured this perfectly in that great incarnation hymn, Hark! the Herald Angels Sing. There are lines that go like this:
Come, Desire of nations, come,
Fix in us Thy humble home;
Rise, the woman’s conqu’ring Seed,
Bruise in us the serpent’s head.
Now display Thy saving power,
Ruined nature now restore;
Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to Thine.
“The woman’s conquering seed, bruising in us the serpents head”—destroying the power of evil over our lives, setting us free from the dominion of the devil. That’s the first thing that God does in his saving grace, in his saving work—the defeat of evil.
(2) But then secondly (and this is so often a missed dimension in the gospel). . .the second part here, of the good news, is the renewal of creation. God not only promises to defeat Satan through Christ. He also promises to restore all that has been lost through sin.
Another great hymn, [often sung at Christmas], is Isaac Watts’ Joy to the World. You remember those lines:
No more let sins and sorrows grow
Nor thorns infest the ground
He comes to make his blessings known
Far as the curse is found.
Well, how far is the curse found? We’ve seen this morning, the curse of sin—the consequences of sin—affect us in every dimension of life! The consequences affect us spiritually, they affect us relationally and socially; the curse affects us psychologically and environmentally. . it affects the created order itself.
But Scripture promises a day (Isaiah 35:1) when: “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the rose.” Streams will break forth in the desert! Peter talks about the creation of a new heavens and a new earth (2 Peter 3). Paul, in Romans 8:19-21, describes how the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. . . “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” That’s what we long for. . .a new heavens and a new earth. We long for the day, for the time, when Christ will make all things new and restore order to the created world itself—cosmic renewal and reconciliation and redemption in Christ. That’s the second piece.
(3) So, the defeat of evil, and then the renewal of creation, but then, thirdly (and this is really the summit of it all): The greatest part of our salvation is reconciliation to God himself, restoration to his favor, so that we once again come to see the face of God!
As we saw at the beginning, sin has caused us now to hide from God’s face. His face is a terror to us because of sin. But, in Christ, that no longer need be the case. In fact, in the last book of the Bible, the last chapter of the Bible contains a wonderful description. We looked at it before in this series, in reference to the Tree of Life, but I want you to read it with me again this morning, Revelation 22:1-5 (and especially verse 4): “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” [So, here, you’ve got the restoration of Eden.] “No longer will there be anything accursed [so here you’ve got the reversal of the curse], but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.”
What is this? This is reconciliation with God. We once again gaze on the face of God, not as a terrifying Judge, but as our beloved Father, our Redeemer, Christ our Elder Brother.
How is it that can even be possible? Here’s how. There came a point in human history where another man, at another tree, was affixed to that tree. . .that tree a curse, because the Scripture had said, “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree. There on that tree Christ bore our curse; he became a curse for us, in our place, and God the Father withheld his presence from his Son. We sang about it this morning:
How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns his face away,
As wounds which mar the chosen One
Bring many sons to glory.
You see, here’s the gospel: the gospel is that, though in our sin we are inclined to hide from the face of God, the good news is that Christ has come and has borne our sin and borne the curse and borne the judgment in our place, so that the Father turned his face away from the Son. . .and in that act of redemption and salvation, mercy comes to us so that He brings “many sons to glory.”
And now, we have this hope—the hope of redemption, where the Lord our God will be our light.
And then notice this at the end of the passage (back to Revelation 22): “They shall reign forever and ever.” Remember that Adam was created to reign, he was created to be kind of the co-ruler, representative of God and his kingdom on earth. And yet, we’ve lost that reign—we’ve lost the kingdom—but the kingdom is restored through Jesus Christ, so that we have this hope of reigning with him forever.
Charles Wesley, again, got it right, and I end with these words, also from Hark! the Herald Angels Sing:
Adam’s likeness, Lord, efface,
Stamp Thine image in its place:
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in Thy love.
Let us Thee, though lost, regain,
Thee, the Life, the inner man:
O, to all Thyself impart,
Formed in each believing heart.
That’s the good news, friend—the defeat of evil, the renewal of creation, and the restoration to the face of God!
Let’s pray.
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are humbled when we consider our sin—both the state of sin in which we were born and in which we live and move and have our being—and the many times that we have sinned. We’re humbled, we’re ashamed, we’re guilty, we’re fearful. Everything that Adam felt in the garden, we also feel. But our great hope and our great confidence is that woman’s conquering seed, who has defeated evil once and for all, has given us this promise of a renewed world, and has given us the reality (not just in the future, but in the reality now) of a restored relationship—that you are God. So that we can gaze on the face of God, in Jesus Christ, the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ!
So thank you for the hope of the gospel this morning. As we gather around the table, we gather to have communion with God. We gather to fellowship with our Savior, Jesus Christ, around the elements—the bread, the juice—as we remember and as we feast upon the broken body and the shed blood of the Lord Jesus. So, as we come to the table this morning, would you draw near to us? May we come in faith, and may your Holy Spirit bind us, unite us ever closer to our Lord Jesus, in whose gracious name we pray. Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
